


fianchetto

by shootingstarcas



Category: the Queen's Gambit
Genre: F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:48:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27275941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shootingstarcas/pseuds/shootingstarcas
Summary: On her way back from the Moscow Invitational, Beth has a layover in New York. She stays at Benny's.-fianchetto— to move the bishop out to the margins, for a clear sight line across the long diagonal.
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Comments: 43
Kudos: 1253





	fianchetto

When Beth steps out of the airport at Newark, Benny’s car is idling at the curb. The others—Harry and Mike and Matt—are long gone, but he’s here, to keep her for a night before the connecting flight back to Kentucky. He takes his hat off when he sees her, his face opening with light, and he looks so much like a kid, bareheaded, that for a moment her heart plummets back to the day she first saw boys talking with girls across the fence from the orphanage. That thing to which she was such an outsider then, she is inside it now. She feels her cheeks warm, her own smile widening, as she sets down her bags on the curb and he pulls her into his arms. Quick, affectionate, he whispers in her ear, “You’ve done it, Beth, you beat him.”

“I couldn’t have done it without you,” she says, pulling away stiffly, but still smiling. She’s so happy to see him again. She’s so happy they’re not fighting.

“You _did_ do it without me,” he says back. He’s looking her in the eyes. But then because Benny’s a good friend—or actually, probably because he’s a good chess player—he anticipates her retreat from the prolonged eye contact, and breaks it himself, reaching down to pick up her bag. The relief from pressure is instantaneous. He loads the bags, she opens her own passenger side door. It’s nighttime, and the arrivals lane is bright with the glare of yellow lights, down until it curves out of sight towards the slip road towards the highway.

“I’m proud of you,” he says, once they’ve been driving for a couple minutes. “And I’m impressed. That’s different, you know. I was really impressed by that rook-pawn combination.” 

“Thank you.” She presses her cheek against the cold window. The thought _I could use a drink_ pops into her brain, but then it disappears just as quickly, more of a default formula than a real desire. She feels safe here with Benny.

They get into the apartment and he reaches for the inflatable mattress, but it’s a feint and they both know it, like in the opening when you move a side pawn to hint at threatening the bishop, and you don’t even have to threaten it, the bishop just moves in response; just like that she finds herself putting her hand on his wrist, and he turns his body towards hers on instinct, lets the mattress pump drop.

“Thank you,” she says again, this time she’s not sure what for. He just nods like he understands, and maybe he does, and then he puts his other hand at the back of her waist.

Later that night, they’re playing chess in the bed, mostly naked and still in that narrow window of post-coital relaxation where she’s at ease with the physical contact. She sits up at the board, one leg thrown over his body, his hand casually resting on her ankle. They’re on their third or fourth round when Benny says, “You made a mistake.”

“I did not,” she says, thinking he means the game with Borgov. She went over and over the game on the plane home already.

“No, not there,” he says, reading the offense in her tone of voice. “Here. Look. Your bishop’s lost in five moves.” And he shows her. Jesus, he’s right. She's lost her bishop by mistake. She almost never makes mistakes. Not with Borgov, not with Beltik, and certainly not anymore with Benny.

“How did I not see that?”

“Maybe it’s jetlag,” he offers, kindly.

“Maybe.”

“Or, maybe,” he says, grinning now, “you’re starting to lose it already. Your gift. You’ve beaten the Russian, so now your brain says, I give up! I'm on vacation!" He dares to look up at her, pushes on, "After all, it’s only downhill from here...”

“Stop,” she says, laughing, and pushes at him with a pillow. This is flirting, this move, she’s seen girls do it in high school. He laughs. “It’s not funny,” she says. “Really, what am I supposed to do now?”

“What are you supposed to do now,” he repeats, running his knuckles up the side of her calf. “Gee, I have no idea.” A beat. He turns his attention back to the board, following through with the bishop capture. “Maybe there are Martians out there who play chess.”

She skims her eyes over the board, sensing the new balance of the pieces, looking for pockets of space where she might launch a counter-attack. She moves a pawn up on the queen side. From his quick response she knows that he sees what she’s seeing.

“Beth.” He's looking at her. She looks at him, then back to the board. “You know I know how this goes.”

“This?” she asks sweetly, pushing the pawn.

“It’s why I didn’t want to sleep with you in the first place,” he says.

That’s not what she was expecting, and in her surprise all the lines and combinations she is envisioning for the chess game drop out of her head, like a cat’s cradle dropping into loose string. He continues, “I was a young prodigy too, remember. I too had older, better players who were my teachers until I got better than them, and then they wanted to fuck me, and afterward I never could tolerate them again. So I know how this goes.”

She looks at him for real, then, because they haven’t ever talked about this before.

“It feels like shit,” he says, “to be better than everyone else at this game.”

“Benny, stop," she says.

“When you can see ten or twelve moves farther than they can—and I know you saw that much farther than Borgov at the end, I know it from what you did—it’s embarrassing. For them. And you can never respect someone, never really respect someone in the way that you have to respect a lover for it to work, who’s embarrassed themselves in front of you like that.”

“So why did you sleep with me?” she asks. "If you knew what was going to happen." She feels something rising in her chest that feels like fear. Fear of rejection, she realizes with a shock, fear that this conversation is going to lead to him saying he doesn’t want to be with her anymore. And that is so new to her that she doesn’t even know what to do with it.

“Because you beat me,” he says.

“But it was weeks later that we—”

“It’s about respect, Beth,” he interrupts. “You earned my respect. You still have it. What I need to know now is that I have yours.”

She sits back. She looks him in the eyes, and though he sounds so serious, so sure of what he's saying, what she sees in his eyes is the same fear of rejection she felt a moment ago. He is making a gambit.

“I don’t know,” she starts, and chokes herself off.

He nods, once, to set a boundary, to give her space, and then he looks back to the board and makes a replying move to her queen side pawn. She only has to glance at it to know what she’ll do next, but she waits, holds the move in her mind, plays out a few variations on what could follow. Gently, she lifts his hand from her ankle and twists to get out of bed. She crosses into the kitchen, opening the fridge to pretend to look for something to eat while she thinks.

Benny’s right, of course; he’s never again going to be as good as her at chess. But then, no one is, or at least no one will be for a long time; and he’s right, it will be lonely. She can imagine it already, the years of loneliness. She’s known for a while now that she would rather have the loneliness than live a compromise with Harry Beltik, or Townes.

But Benny: she tries to picture it. Living here, or in Kentucky, playing games of chess she always wins and loving him anyway. Trusting him, anyway, to see what she sees, to go where her mind leads. And, when he cannot; to give her space. She pictures it.

A few minutes later he gets out of the bed. He leaves the door to the bedroom open when he walks over to her, so that the orange light angles out into the main room. She is still frozen in front of the open refrigerator.

“Hey,” he says, gently. He doesn't touch her. “You don’t have to decide now. That’s not what I’m asking.”

“I like it here,” she says, “with you.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

“I just got scared before.”

“I know. Me too."

She wants to say, _I don’t know what it means to respect a man. I only know that my mother ran away from my father to live in a trailer, and that deep down I desperately, desperately want to recreate her life with mine._ She wants to say, _But I think my mother killed herself too, and I don’t want to die._

“Let’s finish the game,” he says, and they go back to bed, and she kicks his ass in fifteen moves.

The next morning she’s awake before he is, still on Moscow time, and for a while before she gets out of bed she watches him sleeping. For all that talk about “getting in shape” he has a fairly undeveloped body, thin and pale like hers, boyish. She finds herself inexplicably drawn to it, desiring it, remembers that first morning in New York when he walked around bare-chested with his robe open and she thought, now this is a man who can beat me at chess.

She gets up and puts on a clean sweater and slacks from her travel suitcase. She makes coffee, then sandwiches. By that time he’s making waking-up noises in the other room.

“What time’s your flight?” he calls out.

“Not till eleven.”

“Will you do me a favor and get the paper from the top of the stairs?”

So she jogs up to get it, the cold morning air hitting her bare skin like an electric shock, such that she doesn’t bother to look at the front page until she’s back and warm in the kitchen. It’s got her face and name above the fold. The photo was taken just as she was stepping out of the playing hall and it’s pretty good, it’s got her in motion, her expression unset. Benny comes out to look at it over her shoulder.

“In November, Harmon may become the chess world’s first female champion,” he reads out loud. He skims a hand over her far shoulder, kisses the near one. “Not bad, Harmon.”

“I’ll have to beat him again.”

“He won’t put up a fight.”

“He was kind to me, do you know that?” she turns around to face him and he’s close, very close, reflexively she bends back and away. “Borgov. After he resigned, he clapped with the others.”

“Huh. That’s interesting.” Benny frowns a little bit. He dodges her and reaches for the paper to read it more closely. “Maybe you’ve made a friend.”

“Luchenko, too. They were all very kind.”

“They’re of another generation,” he says, picking up his sandwich, speaking casually. “They didn’t grow up with this Cold War, they grew up in the 1930s, they don’t mistrust us the way we mistrust them.”

It _is_ about trust, she realizes then. What Benny was saying last night, too. About the older, better players, when she would beat them and they would try to get into bed with her, it felt like a betrayal of trust. All of this, she and the men, she and the Russians, he’s right; it’s about trust. You reach out your lines of imagination and trust that they can reach out theirs just as far, that they see the moves too.

“Benny,” she says suddenly, “when I play in my mind, the chessboard appears on the ceiling. I play on the ceiling.”

He looks at her, chewing his sandwich. “Oh, cool.” Then he goes back to reading the paper.

“I’ve never told anyone that before.”

He nods, still reading. “I believe you.” Then, “This interview’s pretty good. Did you do it on the plane?”

“Yes. Maybe? I think so.”

“Hey, it mentions me…! ‘The only American player who could challenge her was former champion Benny Wa—”

“It does _not_ say that,” she says, crossing over to read it.

“It does,” he says, “though I don’t like that bit about former, they could say former and _future_ —”

“Never,” she says, laughing.

“Wait till I tell them about you blundering away a bishop to me last night, you think they’d print that?”

“ _Benny_.”

“She can beat the Americans, she can beat the Russians, but when seduced by dashing Southern gentleman Benny Watts, Beth Harmon just _loses_ her—”

“Hey, I won!”

“—composure.”

He smiles, sets down the paper, and turns back towards the bedroom. “Come on,” he says, “we still have time for a few rounds before your flight.”

She wonders if he means chess, follows him anyway.


End file.
